When working with Zend Expressive, if you were to choose a database layer for your application, I guess that the first two names to come to mind would be either ZendDb or Doctrine. But what about Laravel’s ORM: Eloquent? That’s right, Eloquent!

I’ve been getting to know Laravel a bit better recently, primarily for the comparison I wrote about it and Zend Expressive not that long ago. The tutorial was exceptionally well received. So I thought I’d dig a bit further, and see if I could use Eloquent instead of my standard ZendDb. It turns out, with a bit of work, you can do it!

He starts by installing the Eloquent package and setting it up with a simple configuration (using a Homestead environment). With that configuration set up, he shows how to make the Eloquent connection available to the rest of the application. Once the connection is set up he shows how to create a first model - Capital - and using it to create a new record. He also includes examples of retrieving all records and mentions three things that seem missing from this Eloquent install: the "artisan" command, migrations and database seeing functionality.